Methodology

The UK has two parallel food hygiene rating schemes, and you'll see both on this site.

FHRS (Food Hygiene Rating Scheme) covers England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Each premise gets a numeric rating from 0 to 5, where 5 means very good and 0 means urgent improvement necessary. The rating is a snapshot of the conditions found at the most recent inspection.

FHIS (Food Hygiene Information Scheme) covers Scotland. It uses two values: Pass (meets the legal requirements) and Improvement Required (does not meet some of them). Scotland deliberately uses a two-value scheme rather than a numeric rating; this site reports both.

Some premises in either scheme are recorded as AwaitingInspection (not yet visited since registration), AwaitingPublication (inspected, rating not yet finalised), or Exempt (the premise type is exempt from inspection, eg low-risk retail).

1. Every week, a scheduled job pulls the latest XML/JSON bulk feed from the FSA Open API.
2. Each establishment row is parsed and normalised: addresses split into four standard lines, ratings normalised across the two schemes, business types mapped to a stable ID, local-authority IDs resolved to a stable slug.
3. Rows stream into a new table establishments_new via Postgres COPY.
4. Indexes are built on the new table after loading completes.
5. A single atomic ALTER TABLE … RENAME swaps the new table in. The old table is preserved for 24 hours as a rollback safety.
6. Per-business-type and per-authority aggregates are recomputed.

• Some premises have no rating yet (AwaitingInspection) or are exempt. Counts and percentages on this site reflect the data as the FSA publishes it.
• Scotland's FHIS scheme is not directly comparable to FHRS's 0-5 scale. We don't map one to the other; we present each in its own terms.
• Inspection frequency varies by local authority risk-rating policy. A 5-star premise may not have been re-inspected for years; an awaiting-inspection record may be a very new business.
• Latitude/longitude is provided by the FSA where the local authority captures it. Some premises have no coordinates.

If you spot a display error on this site, email contact@foodhygieneratings.com and we'll fix or remove the issue within 48 hours.

We mirror what the FSA publishes — we don't touch the underlying register. If the FSA record itself changes, our next weekly refresh picks it up automatically.

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